Why I hate free/sharewares/OSS
Somehow, people think they need to patronize you.
I have a 10MB file. I use a compression algorithm, since it sees less than 10% gain, it reverts to uncompressed version. that software was meant to compress files less than 1MB in size but we are pushing the envelope with it. Answer of the vendor: it is bad taste to have a file that big, why is it so big? … now … I am not asking whether it is of good or bad taste, I am asking why the befuzzle does it reverts the file. 800K less, I would've lived with it. Even 80K less I would've lived with it.
I have a hard drive containing lots of data, nearing capacity. In fact it got a disk full. I was wondering if it was possible to defrag the drive, and consolidate free space, to make everything go snappier. The answer was EXT2/3 doesn't need defrag under most circumstances, with a lo-ooo-ooong thread on why it's useless under most circumstances. … now … I am not asking whether it is useful or not under most circumstances, I am asking how would I do that, not why Average Joe doesn't need to do that.
Only 2 examples, got more in my arsenal, I might share them with you eventually.
The opposite. I had a piece of software meant to work with 2 or 3 elements at a time. I made it work with hundreds of them. The vendor was more than happy to create specialized tools to make it work for me, in record time, and with a proud stance to know their software was working with so many elements without a hitch. That's commercial software for you.
